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Vegas' Drunken Ramble - Master Vampire
(Week 1, GM: Phil, Player: Chloe, In Game: June 2015) Your cheapest whiskey, please. Neat….You know what? Just leave the bottle, it’s been a long six months. No, scratch that. It’s been a quick six months, quick like you have no clue. Next week I might be going t.....that’s to say, my luck’s close to runn….let’s just say it’s five minutes to midnight and I’m gonna be ringing in the New Year with a whole new set of ‘friends’. I’m not the religious type. Kinda ironic, if you think about it…..but I’m getting this feeling like, I need to talk to someone. Get it all off my chest. And, this is the closest to a confessional I can get without worrying I’m gonna burst into flames. Not literally. I don’t think. I’ll leave out the tragic childhood and angsty teen years, I covered that with the bartender at the last place anyway. So I get to Chicago with - groggy as all get-up after driving through the night - with Jackie napping in shotgun. Oh - you don’t know who Jackie is - you’d love her, it’s pretty ''dangerous not to. ''Almost ''had the taxi driver convinced to adopt her before we got here. She’s this scrawny firecracker of a kid - all elbows and knees swimming in a pair of cargo pants. I’m pretty sure I was taller than her before I hit double digits but hey, it means she doesn’t cost too much to feed. So we meet up with rest of the team - Luiz, Zac and Katerina. I’d worked with all of them before, they’re a good bunch. But anyway, we show up in Chicago and Luiz tells us he knows the name of the most recent victims. The Booker brothers, who - it just so happens - are part of Dutch Schultz’ gang. He ''must ''have some sway round here, I’m ''sure ''you know who I’m talking about - the pinstripes, the slick hair, looks like he’d put a horse head in your bed just ''for the aesthetic? So I’m all ready to head over there - to The Clover. I don’t mean to brag….but, it’s not just anyone ''who can go walking into the centre of the Schultz operation and leave with as many holes in their body as when they went in….I’m ''kinda ''a big deal. But that’s not important, because first we head to Antonio’s - the grade-A salmonella haven that just so happened to be the backdrop of the latest murder. Immediately, Katerina starts scrawling something on the ground. Runes? Talismans? Semaphore? I dunno. It doesn’t matter anyway, because I'' have a rat to catch. So after I let the rat loose in the restaurant, Jackie and I get a chance to talk to the waitress who was working the night of the murders. I’m not proud of what happened next, she was nice...and stubborn as a freaking mule which I can only admire ''in a person. I’m talking to her - getting nowhere - when suddenly blood starts gushing out her nose and eyes. She drops to the table, dead. I feel Jackie stiffen beside me and I can tell something went wrong. And that means things are about to get a whole lot worse. I find out later that there was this mental ''wall ''inside the waitress’ mind and Jackie felt it shatter when she went probing for some additional info - but all I know at the time is that Jackie is panicking, Rollo is about to start tearing up the place (starting with the people) and I don’t need any more blood on my hands ''today. Oh, I haven’t mentioned Rollo yet, have I? Rollo is pretty much Jackie’s pet. Her invisible part lion/part Medusa/part jack-o-lantern pet. Basically, when Rollo needs a timeout you get to the biggest emptiest space you can find, quick. We have a quick meeting of the minds at an abandoned warehouse nearby. It turns out some of the scribbling in the back alley did Katerina and Zac some good. Katerina identifies the creature from their visions as a Master Vampire. Quick hint everyone - lean in close now - if you’re up against a Master Vampire, dying quick is probably your best bet, but if you want to go down fighting you gotta go for the heart with a wooden stake or hack off its head with any item on hand that’ll do the job. So by that time Jackie has calmed down a bit and I realise something, right? I still haven’t gone to see Dutch Schultz. Actually, you know what? Grab me a Guinness, I’ll do a reenactment of the next bit for y’all. So I walk into the The Clover, and I have the immediate attention of like...twelve real thugs. You know the type - you could outthink the lot of them before coffee, even on a bad day, but something tells you they’re not gonna be coming over to offer a quiet game of chess. So I order a Guinness and when the bartender places it in front of me I...watch this... Ok you know what, nevermind ''- it was a lot easier then for some reason. But, hand on my heart, I toss back the whole thing and quietly inform the entire fucking bar that I’m there to help Dutch. Dutch is more than happy to talk, once he realises it could save him a killing. It turns out some Eastern European crew has been killing his men - he thinks it’s a turf war - and their base is in the penthouse suite at the Old Empire Hotel. He also tells me that their leader is a theatre fan and that we can find him at the Opening Night of Carmen this evening. We head out to the Old Empire Hotel. A few of us check out the roof of a nearby building to get a better look of the penthouse while Zac guards the car and, to the best of ''my ''understanding, Luiz goes to have a joint in the bathroom of the hotel, encounters ''masses of Security and gets an innocent man arrested. Jackie passes out the second she opens her Sight up on the rooftop. While she's out, Katerina mojos the wind around the hotel so she can hear them speaking - it’s accented….Eastern European. Then Jackie wakes up, describing powerful wards surrounding the entire building. She’s really having a bad day but you gotta give the kid her props - now we can be pretty certain that Dutch is on the level. But everyone ''knows you don’t go attack Batman when he’s in the Batcave, so we head over to check out our chances at the theatre. Once I convince the staff that we have a VIP who ‘simply must see Carmen tonight’ things start falling into place. There’s definitely something to be said about planning to kill someone in a high class establishment, the service is ''impeccable. By the time I’m done we have tickets, easy entrance to the VIP parking garage and sigils marking out an entrapment spell on a poster on the ceiling of the elevator leading to the building. Celebrities and their crazy demands, right? So I head out for a more distracting ''outfit while the others head back to tail the Master Vampire. Now, I’m not a girl - or a guy - and I never have been, but I find it useful on occasions to... tilt assumptions in one direction or the other. You want someone distracted you tilt one direction, you want someone threatened you tilt the other direction - if you want someone off kilter you split the difference. Some folks get antsy if they can’t work out whether you have an innie or an outie between your legs. So I wait until about quarter to before heading up to the Security Feed Room. By the time my team shows up on the monitors the On Duty Donut Consumer is well distracted by my clavicle. Out of the corner of my eye I see Katerina blast the entire VIP elevator with a wall of ice, as it flicks to the next camera I see the inside coated in solid ice and a lone Security Guard trapped, frozen up to his elbows. It’s probably worth noting at this point that. as it turns out, vampires don’t appear on video footage - so when I tell you the next bit, I want you to keep that in mind. I see Luiz come in, swinging somewhere above the ice, followed by Zac in bear form. And then I ''see ''Rollo. A static blur with large glowing eyes leaps across the display towards the elevator before falling back suddenly. The camera view changes again and I see Jackie, ''alone, stumbling to the ground holding her head. I push the Security Guard away and leg it down to the parking garage. I miss seeing Luiz finish the Master Vampire off with a wooden stake. We manage to retrieve the tattered piece of paper that the Master Vampire was carrying in the briefcase. He’d gotten it off a man on the way to the theatre. It was written in a language none of us recognised and was clearly important enough to bring the Master Vampire all the way to Chicago for. But why am I even talking about that? I never did manage to work out what that guy was about.....